About Jungian Analysis and Psychotherapy

Each psychotherapeutic analysis contains a question, either initiated by the patient or one that I begin to puzzle over about the patient. I wonder what the patient wants, what he is doing here, besides what we have tried to formulate, just as the patient tries to get at what he or she is really coming for. And this question does not occur only on the first day, but recurs, sometimes deliberately reintroduced in order to become more conscious about the analysis. The answers to this question are never as straightforward as those we might read in books that say the patient wants to be loved, or cured of a symptom, or to find, save, or better a relationship, to develop full potential, or be trained as an analyst. (…)

I have come to think that the uncertainty about what the patient and I are really there for is in fact what we are really there for: this third factor that seems wilfully to keep our aims changing and riddling, and presses the question on us even while refusing our answers. This moment of reflective intervention, this third factor in the therapeutic experience, I attribute to soul.

– James Hillman „Healing Fiction”

Jungian psychoanalysis is an approach of therapeutical work that derives from the work of Carl Gustav Jung and the development of analytical psychology that he founded. In Jungian analysis we do not only look for the cause of the symptoms and problems that are the reason of searching for the therapy, we also try to understand their goal, the meaning for the life of the suffering person, the possibility of change that they open. We see those problems as the manifestation of the life long developmental path of the person that Carl Jung called individuation, the process of realizing the personal pattern of wholeness. This individual development does not take place, as it is sometimes regarded, in the isolation from the social world, neither it means “egocentrism”, as some people worry, quite the contrary, it allows to make new and deep relationships to the collective – a family, a group, a society.

Jungian analysts create a rich and diverse community, that remains in dialogue and cooperation with different schools of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy: classical psychoanalysis, object relations theory, attachment theory and the contemporary neuroscience. It allowed to create the unique approach, that participates in the development of the contemporary psychology and at the same time is grounded in the works of its founder, Carl Jung.

Modern psychology is often much concerned with making the suffering person functional again and on his or her adaptation to the conditions of life and work. It is different in Jungian analysis, where too much adaptation or its one-sidedness is often understood as the reason for reported problems. We do not search the ways to make the person more productive, we look for the connectedness to the individual nature of the person, that manifests itself in the process of individuation. That is why we recognize the meaning of both, adaptation to the internal and external world. This process brings the meaningful life and the deep feeling of its sense. Its main environment is an analytical relationship, where equally important is the experience and knowledge of the analyst, and his or her personal equation: the way he or she co-creates the relationship.

Jungian analysis offers the deep understanding of trauma, and especially early trauma. The concepts of archetypal defenses of the self, mechanisms of self-regulation, and self-care system of the psyche that struggles with traumatic experience open new perspectives and possibilities in working with trauma. Similarly the concept of cultural complexes and cultural unconscious changes contemporary understanding of both the collective processes, and their meaning for the individual psyche.